Teaching Yourself a foreign language can be fun, rewarding and accessible to anybody that is the proud owner of the most complex creation in the universe, a brain. Unfortunately brains don't come with a manual and they are often wasted.
Making mistakes when doing something new is easy. Fortunately it is also easy to do it right when someone teaches you how.
1. Teach Yourself a language by reading all the Grammar books you can get hold of. Wonderful idea. I am the kind of person that likes to understand how things work and I enjoy learning by reading, somehow things stick better for me when I have a printed page (or screen) to read it from. However learning languages is not something you can read about. Learning a language by reading books is like trying to learn how to swim by reading a book. It is a waste of time unless you are willing to get wet. Once you are a confident swimmer reading a good article or book on swimming techniques might help you improve your form and skills. Something similar occurs with Grammar, it can be a great help and even provide useful shortcuts in language learning, but it is a waste of time by itself.
2. Teach Yourself By Expecting Others To Teach You. This is one of the biggest mistakes of students of all subjects, especially languages. Nobody can teach you anything! The best teacher in the world can only help you to teach yourself. For you to really learn something you must handle it, control it, use it. Learning Languages is like going to the toilet, some things you just have to do by yourself. Others can build the toilet, give you toilet paper and even teach how to use them but... well you get the picture, get into the driving seat of your education and learn how to become your best teacher and student.
3. Study too much. Learning involves studying, but you can do too much of it. Research into the learning and the process of creativity have shown that for our brain to use what it has absorbed a period of incubation is necessary. By incubation we mean allowing for some time for our brain to chew on what we learn and work out how to use it. Allowing for breaks in our learning will help the new links and connection we have created through learning to fix and strengthen themselves without having to compete with other stimuli. The body builder analogy works well. Clever body builders allow for time (often a day or two) in between training of muscle groups.
4. Learn FAST! I am not saying you should learn slowly but trying to learn too quickly simply doesn't as well. A classic experiment in education psychology involved British Postal workers. The goal was to teach them to use a new machine. Postal workers that were taught an hour a day learned twice as fast as those that learned in two hour sessions. Put differently the more hours a day they spent learning the slower they learned. In this case more is really less. When you plan your language learning schedule schedule small but regular chunks of learning.
5. Not making mistakes! Making mistakes by practicing and using our new language is vital if you want to learn it properly. Some teaching methods help students to memorize some vocabulary and help them use it in set phrases very efficiently with minimal mistakes. This unfortunately is not very useful if you can't use it in realistic settings. It has been found that forgetting and re-remembering, making mistakes and learning from them are necessary for efficient learning. Don't be scared of making mistakes, expect to make them and learn from them.
Andrew Latham.
Teach Yourself a Language The Right Way at Language Vox. Teaching yourself a language is something only you can do but I can help you do it better.
Read more articles on Language Learning at my Teach Yourself Blog
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